Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: The Film’s Graphic Realisation

Tarkovsky on Crafting the Artistic Image: The Film’s Graphic Realisation

In discussing a film’s graphic realisation, Andrey Tarkovsky says, “On occasion I have even concealed the idea of a film altogether in order to make the camer-man handle it the right way”, seeming to point to an auteur’s perspective on filmmaking (135).  Then later he states, “In practice I have never had any secrets from my colleagues: on the contrary, throughout the shooting the team have always worked as one man” (135-136).  Which is it?  Mr. Tarkovsky, are you an auteur or a collaborator? 
 

Is Any Director Really an Auteur?

Some directors are not very good collaborators, but in all I’ve read from Tarkovsky’s Sculpting In Time up to this point, he highly values the collaboration of his filmmaking colleagues.  This same line of thought on the importance of his vision as an author-director versus the importance of his team has continued throughout.  He concedes that there have been times where collaboration has fallen apart, such as between his camer-man on Mirror, Georgi Rerberg,  of which he states, “when the camera-man and I ceased to understand each other, I was utterly lost.  Everything fell out of my hands and for several days we were in no state to go on shooting.  Only when we found a means of communicating again was equilibrium restored, and we resumed filming.  In other words, the creative process was controlled not by discipline and schedule but by the psychological climate prevailing in the team.  Moreover, we finished shooting ahead of time” (136).  That doesn’t speak of a director who is adamant on bending his crew to his vision, but to a leader more interested in helping his team to organically realise internally what the film should be together.  He in fact believed that the art of filmmaking, “like any other artistic authorship, has to be subject first and foremost to inner demands, not to the outward demands of discipline, and production , which , if too much store is set by them, only destroy the working rhythm” (Tarkovsky 136).  He instead asserted that a team unified by one passion makes it possible to “move mountains” (136).

Yet a team of people moving mountains takes time.  In the Russia of Tarkovsky’s filmmaking days, the films were government funded and the film production schedules were considerably longer than the standard 2 to 4 months of shooting time that were common in the United States during the same time period.  Would Tarkovsky have had as much success in his filmmaking method in the United States as he did in Russia?  We can’t really know, however, the fact is he did  succeed within the constraints of his own filmmaking community.  And the desire for a community in filmmaking may be a large reason for the success of his films.

In his exposition on The Film’s Graphic Realisation, Tarkovsky once more turns to the film Mirror to give illustrations in explaining the method of his craft.  That method largely meant getting to the core, or inner workings, of what the life force of the story was through exploration not only of Tarkovsky’s story, but also of the inner workings of the cast’s and key crew members’ relationship to the world that Tarkovsky was first introducing to them.  Tarkovsky shared his world with them and they shared their experience of that world with him.  He recollects how “we spent every possible moment together; we would talk about what each of us knew and loved, about things we held dear and things we hated” (136).  Part of that time spent together was in Tarkovsky’s childhood home that had been rebuilt on its original foundations.  They would gather together there in order “to wait for the dawn, to experience for ourselves what was special about the place, to study it in different weather conditions, to see it at different times of the day; we wanted to immerse ourselves in the sensations of the people who had once lived in that house” (Tarkovsky 136).  It was not enough for Tarkovsky to tell them what he wanted.  He believed that his cast and crew needed to experience that story on a living level in order for them to actually understand how to present it truthfully, authentically.  And they lived in that world for just over 8 months.

Questions, Comments, and Concerns

Over the 8 plus months of the film shoot, Tarkovsky and his team of filmmakers overcame many obstacles as he shared his “deeply private” world with them and in the process of that the team came to “accept as their own an idea” which then became the film called Mirror.  Bringing a community together of fellow artists and artisans to not just build an honest artwork, but to build a fellowship, is indeed a high stakes endeavor.  Will the investment of time and resources pay off in the same force of energies that was put into it?  How much of that pay off, or outcome, shows up in the artwork itself?  How much of the outcome of energy shows up in the relationships of those within that community?  Tarkovsky said of the conclusion of the film shoot that “the completion of work came as a painful wrench, as if that was the moment at which we should have been starting on it: by that time we had almost become a part of one another” (136).  How valuable is the bonding of a community?  Though in the United States it may be largely impractical to have an 8-month long film shoot, we can perhaps adopt some of Tarkovsky’s methods on a micro-scale to our benefit.  Perhaps by considering not only the bottom line of our productions, which means getting them done as efficiently as possible, but also in considering the growth and the development of the people on set, we can slow down just enough to also produce something of lasting value and meaning.  After all, people aren’t primarily beings of efficiency.  We are foremost beings of communion.  And quite frankly, I don’t believe efficient films are what audiences crave, but films that connect with them deeply.  And only deep can call out to deep.